Henry Billings Brown

Henry Billings Brown (2 March 1836-4 September 1913) was an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court from 29 December 1890 to 28 May 1906, succeeding Samuel Freeman Miller and preceding William Henry Moody.

Biography
Henry Billings Brown was born in Lee, Massachusetts in 1836, and he became a lawyer in Detroit, Michigan in 1860. From 1861 to 1868, he served as a Deputy US Marshal, Assistant US Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, and a member of the Wayne County Circuit Court, and he went on to serve as a district court judge from 1875 to 1890, when he was appointed to the US Supreme Court by President Benjamin Harrison. In 1896, he issued the majority opinion on Plessy v. Ferguson, relying on racist ideas to support a clearly discriminatory policy; he semantically classed it as a "social law" which merely recognized the social distinction between the races. He retired in 1906 and died in Bronxville, New York in 1913.